scarlet kipling /d6

He wakes slowly, right arm curled around his pillow, left hand braced against the bed, time to get up.

He's bad at it, mornings are hard, always have been no matter how determined he is to be an early riser. It's probably all the sunrises, they've always made him a little sad. Just another day to separate him from the 'Before' and push him further into the 'After'. It's getting hard to remember what his mother looked like.

Shoulders first, Scarlet Kipling pushes himself up on one arm which causes the duvet to slide down his bare back, a shiver follows. "C'mon dad, it's November," he grumbles softly. He must've left the back door open again.

The house is silent at six thirty in the morning and Scarlet steps carefully along the edge of the hallway so that he doesn't wake his dad up. Twenty years old and it's a Saturday but Scar has followed the same routine for as long as he can remember.

He's jogging along the road ten minutes later. His breath clouds in front of his mouth and trails behind him like cigarette smoke. Running is mindless work, just body moving, sometimes he shuts his eyes for a few strides and it feels like he's flying. Scar used to grumble about it when his mom, a career born in Two, would shake him awake, already jogging in place, but now when he runs he can pretend that the echo of his feet are two sets.

He feels her presence the most when he's fighting. Bruises blossoming along his jawline, the skin on his knuckle split, it reminds him of mornings in the backyard.

Scar can hear her voice in his head, yelling out his next move. It's the only training map he's got now since she died and they left Three. All he's got in Six are dusty old books of essays that researchers wrote about careers as if they were a whole different species.

And he already feels alien here.

Scar gets back to the house by seven. The door to the work shed is wide open and he knows that coffee's on before he even smells it. His dad doesn't sleep anymore, not really, not since the fire nine years ago when they'd had to flee Three. That night's hard to remember for Scar. A lot of it's just seconds of memory playing over and over again. His mother shooing him into the hall closet, turning away to fight and the last thing he sees is her feet sliding into a fighting stance. Then the sound of Keeper boots on hardwood, bone snapping, a sweet-heady chemical scent, the strike of a match, the smoke, the heat, then–

pain. Burning, something charring and crumbling in his grasp, arms around his waist, pulling him out of the smoke, running, sirens and lights shining down onto the street, hiding behind a shed, his dad pushing him through a tear in a fence. "I don't know how they found us out."

The air tastes of smoke, it hurts to breathe, burnt flesh, following his dad, yew trees, then the belt and the sock and the axe.

After that, there's just waking up in this house, a bandage around his right elbow and the absence of his right hand. Skin grafted over the stump, and burn scars all the way up his arm to run over his shoulder. But sunlight across the blanket over his legs and his dad sitting in the corner, clear paths from the corners of his eyes drawn through the ash staining his cheeks.

"You tried to pull your mum out," His dad'd said. "But they'd doused her in gasoline."

And he's never missed his hand because of that but sometimes when his dad looks at him with such empty eyes, Scar feels like he should have done more.

"Work soon," his dad says as he comes out of the shed. His toolbox is under his arm and he's got the handle of Scarlet's in his hand.

"Yeah," Scarlet says and slips into the house before his dad, "Just gotta shower, ten minutes."

He pours a cup of coffee and dumps two spoons of hot chocolate mix in. Scar takes it into the shower with him, stepping in before the water really has time to heat up to cool himself off.

Work is a forty-five minute walk to an old warehouse in the middle of the industrial park. Jordan Fielder falls in beside him around 5th street, they graduated high school together two years back. He works five warehouses down and builds machines that can do precision surgeries for the Capitol. "Coming to Andy's tonight, Kip?" he asks.

"Gotta work Feeler, you know how it is," Scar says with an easy grin. They kind of do the same thing. Jordan builds robots to heal people and he helps his dad build robots designed to overthrow the government.

"You say that every week, Kip."

"Sorry."

He and his dad always stay late on mission nights in case something happens to the mecha suit while Elliot's out in it and they need to fix it. The suits have needed work after nearly every mission lately and Scarlet's dad has been teaching him mechanics since he was a kid so it was only natural that he joined up after finishing school.

Coded knock to get into the warehouse compound, coded knock to enter the building, bug check over their clothes and then down to the basement to the workshop where Storm is. Scarlet slows as they move through the common area. Sometimes Harriet leaves muffins out for him. Ever since he started actually doing work around here he sees her less but she still reminds him through little things like that, that she's always around.

There're no muffins but the pilot, Elliot, is leaning against a wall, probably waiting for the Commander.

She seems far away so he doesn't try saying hello. He just follows his dad down the stairs. Part of him still wishes he did, that he'd told her good luck or something, said anything at all really but it's not like Scarlet even knew her well.

The mecha suit comes back in pieces that night and Elliot doesn't wake up. Scar asks Storm about it but he hasn't got clearance to know what went wrong. The hard drives on the suit are wiped clean, there's no footage to even give a clue.

Elliot's just gone.

"No she's not," Scar argues, "She's still synched right? Maybe we can program the suit to-" "That's not our problem Scar."

Storm finally sends them upstairs for a rest around three in the morning. His dad falls asleep on one of the couches in the common area but Scarlet just lays there in the dark. When he shuts his eyes, he sees fire and he can feel his mother's wrist, burning under his right hand like a phantom pain.

At Six his body moves, mindless work, he runs around the cement floor of the common area in socked feet so he doesn't wake his dad up. He veers off path down a long hallway, running as hard as he can, only slowing down when he turns sharp around a corner to a wash of blue light on the wall.

The stasis chambers, all dark and powered down but for one.

"Hey," Scar says softly.

Elliot says nothing, eyes shut, trapped in a burning house.

He sits beside her chamber for a long time, forehead against the glass, lost in thought. Eventually his watch beeps to tell him that it's seven thirty. He has to get back, the mecha suit is going to take another full day to fix after yesterday and his dad is probably downstairs waiting for him. That doesn't matter, he's already decided.

"Hey I know you're in there," Scar says and raps his knuckle lightly against the chamber, "And I'm not gonna let you disappear."

He nods a little, this isn't only for Elliot. His mother made him a fighter, his dad gave him a tinkerer's mind and he's never been able to leave well enough alone because of it. He wrests his pinky against the glass.

"It's a promise."